1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communications routing. More particularly, the present invention relates to routing communications from customers to agents of a service center.
2. Background Information
A need exists for businesses to provide services and/or products to clients and customers who use a variety of communications modalities to contact a multi-modal service center. A conventional service center provides services and/or products to clients and customers who contact the service center using a conventional telephone. As a result, a business may not be providing services and/or products to the full potential range of clients and customers. For example, a client or customer may wish to contact a service center via the internet. Accordingly, there is a need to provide multi-modal service centers that can be contacted via multiple communications modalities by clients and customers. Additionally, there is a need to provide multi-modal agents that can receive and process requests from clients and customers.
Furthermore, a need exists to model agents and to provide a different agent model for each communications modality with which a multi-modal agent can receive requests. A conventional service center may process telephone requests by routing the client or customer to a best-matched agent. In particular, a profile of the client or customer may be used to create a model of the client or customer before routing the client or customer communications to an agent. Additionally, agent models may be created based on characteristics of the agent. Models of available agents may be compared with the model of the client or customer to determine a best-matched agent. However, models have conventionally been used to route calls for clients or customers using conventional telephones to contact an agent using a conventional telephone or telephone headset at the service center. A multi-modal service center, that can receive and process requests from clients or customers using multiple communications modalities, needs to recognize the differences in an agent's capability to receive and process requests for different modalities. Accordingly, there is a need for a multi-modal service center to incorporate into the modeling the differences in the modalities with which the service center can be contacted. Furthermore, there is a need to incorporate into the modeling the differences in the modalities with which a single agent can be contacted.
Additionally, a need exists to model automated agents that are provided at a multi-modal service center. A conventional service center processes requests by routing the requests to a human agent. However, using the different modalities available today, a product and/or service may be provided by a service center using an automated self-service agent application, an automated agent application employing speech recognition technology, or any other automated agent application. Accordingly, there is a need to provide the automated agent applications, and to model the automated agent applications for consideration when routing client and customer communications to a best matched agent using customer/client profiling and agent modeling.
Accordingly, a need exists for a service center to receive client and/or customer requests of a variety of modalities. Moreover, a need exists to identify a modality of the requested communications. Furthermore, a need exists to select agent models based upon an identified modality of the requested communications. Moreover, a need exists to compare the selected agent models with the customer profile so that a best matched agent can be determined. Additionally, a need exists to model automated agents for inclusion in the matching process at a multi-modal service center.
To solve the above-described problems, a system is provided for intelligently routing customer communications to an agent.